Red Hat bets big on a future full of open source, Kubernetes, and containers as it agrees to purchase CoreOS for a cool $250 million.

Red Hat announced yesterday that it has signed an agreement to purchase CoreOS, a leader in Kubernetes and container native solutions for a cool purchasing price of $250 million. This acquisition places Red Hat, a leading provider of open source solutions, firmly on the side of a more containerized future.

“We believe this acquisition cements Red Hat as a cornerstone of hybrid cloud and modern app deployments,” said Paul Cormier, President of Products and Technologies at Red Hat.

Cormier went on to say, “The next era of technology is being driven by container-based applications that span multi- and hybrid cloud environments, including physical, virtual, private cloud and public cloud platforms. Kubernetes, containers and Linux are at the heart of this transformation, and, like Red Hat, CoreOS has been a leader in both the upstream open source communities that are fueling these innovations and its work to bring enterprise-grade Kubernetes to customers. We believe this acquisition cements Red Hat as a cornerstone of hybrid cloud and modern app deployments.”

CoreOS’s main attraction, Container Linux, is a lightweight open source OS designed to provide infrastructure for cluster deployments. A focus on automation, easy deployment, security, reliability, and scalability has made Container Linux a popular option for any developer running a containerized system.

Another major CoreOS product, Tectonic, is a secure, automated, and hybrid enterprise Kubernetes platform. It automates operational tasks, enables platform portability and multi-cluster management, and is always current with the latest upstream OSS so as to eliminate vendor lock-in.

CoreOS has spent the last five years setting up various open source projects for automated operations and containers. As the industry shifts towards a containerized ecosystem, CoreOs products like Container Linux and etcd have served as a solid foundation for modern distributed systems like Kubernetes.

Red Hat’s acquisition of CoreOS can be seen as doubling down on a bet on an open source future, with innovation and collaboration with the entire community. Red Hat is already a leader in hybrid cloud platform for modern application workloads with its broad Kubernetes and container-based portfolio. The addition of CoreOS’s complementary capabilities is just emphasizing their ability to help customers build any application and deploy them in any environment.